The Cutting Truth
by Analise
Summary: A short story written from an outside point of view. How one stranger's life changes after meeting a dispossessed Aeryn Sun.


**THE CUTTING TRUTH **  
by analise

**Spoilers:**None   
**Rating:**PG   
**Category:** J/A, Drama, Romance, Outside POV   
**Archive:** Anywhere, just let me know   
**Notes:** Thanks to Kirby Crow for her insightful comments. Thanks to the show for providing me with a new obsession just as the old one ran out.  
**Summary:** A short piece written from an outside point of view. How one stranger's life changes after meeting a dispossessed Aeryn Sun.  
**Feedback:** Yes, please. [analise@2cowherd.net][1] Disclaimer: The Farscape characters don't belong to me. Obviously.

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This is not my story. That would be long and boring and hardly worth anyone's while. It is not her story, though I suspect that one would be considerably more interesting. But this is *a* story. And I tell it. Oddly enough, I find that it is almost all I have. 

My brother died a few years ago. Yaro had been an Enforcer in our colony and his partner had not been there to back him up when he'd chased a pair of Kaidin thieves down an alley. Not that it was his partner's fault. Not at all. She had thought to try and cut off the two transgressors, but it had been a dead end alley that Yaro had chased the criminals into and she had not realized until too late that it was a trap. 

So, he had been found, dead. Lying there in that filthy, dusty alley that was his last view of life. He had died alone. They had shot him with his own pulse rifle. The rifle they had wanted in the first place. 

Yaro's partner told my Clan of her deep sense of shame. Of her failure. We took her apology and gave our forgiveness. Yaro was one of 13 siblings, but he had always been the closest to me. I suppose I didn't let it get to me too badly, and I know that surprised my clanmates. He was gone, and I simply had to accept that. It was something I could always do. Accept. 

My Clan mother couldn't do that. She still mourns Yaro, even to this day, 3 cycles later, she blames herself. She had convinced him in the beginning to join the Enforcers. He had not wanted to, but had conceded to her wishes. The unfairness of it, she would weep. Unfair? Maybe. I no longer had a brother named Yaro, but I couldn't and wouldn't let that fact cripple me. 

I hadn't been able respect her, to understand her inability to accept. There was no reason, in my mind, why she couldn't just take it in, learn from it, and get back to her life. Each action has a reaction. Don't know where I heard that, but it's true. We don't live in the vacuum of space, and things we do affect everything around us. To me, her pain made her weak. 

But. 

But now I begin to know exactly how my mother feels. And I *do* know that I will never let go of this moment. That it will hang about my neck like a stone that I will bear for the rest of my days. 

And all I can do is stand and stare. Numb. The plex of the medical center is as cool under my fingers as the white sheet that drapes the still form beyond. Not moving. 

And never really mine at all. 

**** 

The rattle and the roar of the central air-recycling units were just background. The everyday sounds that I lived with. Aural wallpaper. Newcomers would cringe and shout and slap their hands over their ears at the cacophony, but I could hear the sound of a bolt hitting the floor through the noise. Maybe it was because I had spent most of my life in the Quarry. The rich, hot scent of the near-molten Kaidin was likened to many things, but to me, it smelled like life. Rotten swamp gas too, I suppose. I was used to it. Every now and then the continuous growl of the cooling units would be broken by the high-pitched shriek of the Cutters as a new vein of Kaidin was exposed in the main cavern. I found it to be a comforting sound. 

Only Rookies wore earplugs. 

It was a new day and I was leaning on the command center panel, going over the roster from the evening before. It was part of my morning ritual to check that all the proper gear had been replaced, that no one had died who needed to be replaced on the Wall, when she had walked through the archway into the booth. I had heard her footsteps before I saw her, even under the booming of the giant battery towers as they recharged. I glanced up quickly, expecting it to be Lanaa with the new morning roster. 

It was definitely not Lanaa, my red-faced, rotund little Pit Boss Chief. 

This is the part where I tell you how I met her. This is where the real beginning is, if there is such a thing. And there was no music or silent singing bells, or any of that dren. Instead, it was as if someone had punched me in the gut. 

Hard. 

Sentimental? Not me. I don't buy into it. Never have. No, I was not normally given to overt emotion at the best of times. But, By Hezmana, she was different. She moved like a weapon, all sharp cuts and dark slashes of barely concealed pain. Her body was the hard edge of a shadow, the terminus just before it shifts back to the colors of light and life. Tall, slender, her limbs clad in black to match the crushed kohl of her short hair, her face would never be called pretty, but she was breathtaking. Azure eyes blazed from a gaunt face that was dominated by a blade-like nose, pale skin like the unblemished face of our colony's sister moon, tendrils of black framing her cheeks in short wisps. 

Was it possible to ache for someone you didn't even know? Was it possible to fall in love on sight? She hadn't even spoken yet and I had already known that the mystery she carried in those fathomless eyes was one that I would obsess over. 

Now, I'm not exactly the catch that most females might want to bring home to their clans in pride. But I have a good position at the Cutting Quarry, you might even call me the man in charge, and I'm not too terrible to look at. My sisters mock me with comparisons of barrels and cargo containers, and it's true that I have a stocky build, but there are definitely males worse off than me in the looks department. It's also true that I'm the oldest of my siblings and the only one yet unmatched, but I've always given that to the fact that I've spent more time Cutting than seeking a mate. The few times I have attempted to connect with females have been failures. There was always something missing. It didn't seem worth the effort. 

Frankly, Cutting was always simpler. Even if you risked your life each and every day to do it. 

"I'm here to check in with Alzar Das." Her voice matched the razor whip of her body. She wanted nothing from me except the bare necessity. Courtesy itself would have been a trapping. It might have been the first and only time in my life when I was at a loss for words, sensing immediately that I wanted to give her exactly what she silently demanded of me. Which was, as I said, absolutely nothing. 

It was only then that I noticed the crisply folded orange jump that she had tucked under her arm and the helmet and infra-goggles that swung from one long-boned, graceful hand. She was a new hire. She was here to work for me. The surge of emotion that flooded me was unexpected. There was something inside my chest that had sparked upon seeing her... something that I hadn't felt before. She didn't seem to notice. Or perhaps she did and just didn't care that some middle-aged colonist was staring at her like she was one of the Nine Headless Gods of the Sheyang. 

It took me a moment to regain my composure, running a quick and uncharacteristically nervous hand through close-cropped, pale hair before I tapped the panel to access crew manifest. Central Recruiting would have added her already if she was standing in front of me. Funny that it hadn't even occurred to me that she was here to work for me. She had looked anything but a Kaidin Cutter. She looked like a warrior. 

Her manifest came up immediately. Aeryn. Just Aeryn. I scanned her info perhaps a bit more carefully than I might have for any other miscellaneous new hire. I certainly saw enough of them walk through my door. Few lasted more than a minimum of weeks. The pay was good, but it was daunting, dangerous work. Many of the sentients that walked in were carried out. Either in a bag or on a stretcher. 

She was from another colony planet in the Uncharted Territories, a world I had never heard of named Moya. But then, most of the worlds in the Territories were unknown to me. It wasn't like my career called for much travel. She was Sebacean though, and that must have been enough to get her through Hiring. They were notoriously racist despite their breakaway politics. 

The rest of her stats were standard. Unmarried, because we would hire no-one who was bound to another. Free of sickness and disease. Young enough and strong enough. I don't know what I was expecting to find on the manifest as I stared at it, maybe a reason behind the pain in her eyes. Maybe an answer to the enigma of why she had stepped up to work in such a dangerous job. But there was nothing except a stark screen full of blank lines that could never hope to sketch out a life. 

"Have you signed the waiver?" I asked, pleased that my voice was cool, that I was able to provide the bare minimum of both question and conversation. The mild relief and gratitude for my lack of prying, for my decision to avoid small talk, transformed her face just enough that she became beautiful in that moment. She nodded and passed me a data card. I realized that I wanted to see her smile. 

"All right then," I said as I scanned the card and entered her all the way into the system. "Let me give you a quick orientation." She nodded sharply and I led her out into the main cavern, hoping that she didn't know or guess that the Booth Chief didn't normally do such things. 

Whatever her thoughts, she kept them to herself, and I gave a quick demo on how to use the Cutter, knowing that her crew boss would give her the full training. I strapped the deadly laser onto my wrist and turned it to its lowest setting before flexing my thumb and watching as the green beam sliced into the area of the wall I had selected. The weak stream peeled the Kaidin-free rock like soft fruit. I saw her nod approvingly at the efficiency of it out of the corner of my eye. 

"You'll have to take a quick training session on the Wall, which is where most of the Cutting is done." I gestured out towards the main cavern, a vast, dark cylindrical pit that sank thousands of clicks down through the planet crust. Slashes of green light lit its surface like a hundred tiny photoluminescent insects - Cutters, quarry workers, suspended on the sheer walls in an intricate network of rigging, cutting away at the black stone surface bit by bit. "I assume you know how to climb or they wouldn't have let you through Recruiting." I wanted to draw her into conversation, wanted to hear her voice again. 

"Yes," was all I got. I led her on to the main Cavern and reluctantly left her with the Pit Boss of the Crevice she would be working. Jurda did not even pause before starting up the safety lecture that he gave to every new hire. She did not look back at me as I walked away. 

I would not see her again for another monen. 

I had not forgotten her. In fact, I doubt there was a day that passed that I didn't check her manifest in the system to see if she was still alive and uninjured. I would find myself staring through the plex window of the command booth at the familiar sight of the distant Wall and its accompanying green specks and wondering which was her. I found it not surprising at all that she seemed to be turning in record Cuts, working overtime and pulling the worst shifts. That would endear her to the OldTimers, I knew. But I doubted that that was the reason behind her dedication. I used my security clearance to surreptitiously check her account, and saw that she was not spending the wealth that she accumulated. 

My Aeryn had become a constant mental companion, her image fused into my mind. It was not her startling beauty that kept my thoughts returning again and again to her. Though she was beautiful. Her long limbs and slender grace followed me into my dreams at night and populated the ridiculous fantasies I indulged in during my days. It was more that I felt drawn to her. She represented something to me. Strength. Yes. Competence. Yes. But was it her obvious pain that attracted me most? That seemed impossible. 

Me, a man who had always been so numb to cloying emotional baggage. Even my own brother's death had not affected me so. I would not let it. My Clan Mother's pain merely irritated me. But Aeryn's. Why was hers different? And what was its source? I longed to know her story. More, I longed to be the one that she healed with. 

I would imagine her confiding in me, tears in those cloudless eyes, sharing her pain and freeing herself of its shackles. I would tell her about my brother and how much better it was not to drag the chains of the past behind us. She would see my wisdom then, I knew. She would be grateful. I even went so far as to picture her sharing my life after. 

Time marched and I did not ease in my obsession. Instead I nurtured it, stroked it to greater intensities. 

And then fate favored me. 

It was in the mess hall, and I had taken a rare lunch with the crews. Normally I worked through the midday meal, but I had been doing overtime to deal with a breakdown in Delta Crevice. I was starving and exhausted. I took a table apart from the workers, uninterested in idle chatter. 

When she had settled down on the narrow bench across from me it took a moment to realize that it was her. I looked up, saw her face, and my heart literally skipped like a flat rock on a smooth pond. Her presence was a warm flame, banked but still burning. I thought perhaps it might sear to the bone when blazing at full. 

We did not talk that first day, and I think that was what established me as a worthy meal partner. She valued her quiet, and whatever else she might be getting from her self-imposed exile in the Cutting Quarry on our colony world, she was not here for the conversation. 

I did not miss a midday break from that point on, and Aeryn was always there, sitting across from me. Silent. Beautiful with her dark mystery. And I, the insensitive one, the one who had about as much empathy as could fit on the head of a ritter joist, I could tell that she was testing me. 

Respected by all the crew in the Quarry for her skill and her fearlessness, she befriended no one. No one until the day that she sat down with me had she made any overture to anyone in the entire operation. She spoke little at first, but as the days passed, she spoke more. Squeezing water from stone indeed, but I was patient. I always had been. I could wait for her. 

And eventually we struck up small conversations about most things... Peacekeeper policies and why this colony had abandoned them... internal Quarry workings and even my Clan came up once or twice. She had actually seemed almost interested in the boring details of my life amongst my 13 clan siblings. 

I did love her. Is that foolish? Each passing day I spent in her company I grew to love her more. 

But even as I did I also became certain that she would never love me back. She carried a grief with her that she would not let go. Half a cycle passed, and still I didn't know why. 

Until. 

"You have a kind face," she said one day without looking up from the tasteless stew that the shift cooks had prepared for the crews. It was the most intimate thing she had ever said to me and it startled me. But she didn't follow up on the comment and I had known better than to pursue it. Aeryn did not take to prodding. You had to let her come out with it on her own time. Under her own conditions. Everything was that way with her, and it was almost comforting not to be expected to fish your way into what she might or might not want you to say in return. 

But she had said the words so wistfully, so softly, that I almost thought someone else had spoken them. 

Her hair was growing out of the harsh, jagged cut it had sported when she'd arrived, curling around her ears now, tickling her jawline. It softened her look, but not her expression. I still had never seen her smile. 

"He had the kindest face I had ever seen. I once was foolish enough to think of that as a weakness." 

With a pounding heart I realized that she was speaking of the something, of the some*one*, that was at the heart of her pain. 

Why she ever even said anything, why she said it *then*, I don't know. Even now. Maybe she had finally needed to excise some of her sorrow. Or perhaps she had her own reasons for talking to me that day. With Aeryn you could never tell. 

I did not speak, my heart still thumping irregularly against my ribs. I continued to eat as if she had just spoken of the weather outside or the current market-price of Kaidin. A risked glance up told me that she was staring somewhere over my head and there was the smallest of sad smiles on her lips. It was transforming, that smile. Faint as it was, I swear I had never seen anything so lovely in my life. 

"I wasn't there for him, you know. It was so stupid. An argument. But he was so infuriating sometimes..." her voice broke the tiniest bit, and I worried that she would stop. I couldn't believe that my Aeryn was finally opening up to me. In the mess hall of all places. I had imagined something... else. 

It took all my concentration to remember to keep eating. I reached for the plastic bowl of cracker-bread just to keep from touching her. I had never touched her. 

She shook her head sharply then, as if throwing off the sentiment that tightened her voice. I could hear the click of her throat as she swallowed. A moment later I heard the scrape of spoon against bowl, and I knew she had returned to her meal. 

But I wanted more. 

"What happened?" I dared. I continued eating as if it were not a milestone question. As if it were not the first time I had plumbed the surface of her enigmatic exterior. I did not look up, but waited to hear the scrape of the bench as she rose. 

There was only silence. 

I risked a glance, and was stunned to see what looked like moisture gathering in her blue eyes. Her hand gripped the spoon with white knuckles and I could see that she was far, far away from me. Far from the Quarry. Probably even far from the chunk of rock that constituted our colony world. 

"They had gone down to the planet surface. I hadn't gone with them, hadn't even seen them off. I was angry. Angry about something he'd said." Her breath hitched softly. "Frell!" she cursed under her breath, looking down at the table, staring at the molded poly of the utensil in her fingers. "I can't even remember why I was angry anymore. Something so stupid, so childish... and it was enough, in the end of things, enough to drive him off. Enough that I did not go with him. They came back without him." Another deep breath, this one stronger, almost forced. "They said that it had been an accident. That there was nothing anyone could have done." 

"Words. Only words." The sorrow in her voice was enough to crush. I could feel my own pathetic sense of empathy twisting in my chest. I wanted to hold her. I wanted to tell her that it was all right to cry. I, of course, could do neither. I could only listen as she went on. 

"He slipped, Alzar." Her voice was so low, a mixture of grief and fury that tore at me. "He slipped on some spilled cooking oil on some frelling steps on some frelling backwater world. He slipped and he cracked his skull. All the things he had survived and endured. Even me. And. He. Just. Slipped." Her fist came down suddenly, hard, onto the table, slamming into the surface and rattling the dishes. The buzz of the mess hall died down and eyes turned towards us. Their attention was a palpable thing, like bugs flittering helpless against a light. Aeryn didn't seem to notice. She was staring at the blood that welled up from her palm where the spoon had cut into her. Dispassionately. 

I knew then, of course, that she was here to die. That she had come here specifically for that reason. I wanted to scream at her, to slap her. I wanted to kiss her. 

As always, I did nothing. 

"They didn't even bring him back to me." Her voice was low again, and slowly, the rest of the Hall went back to their own conversations. Eyes peeling off of us pair by pair until we were alone again. "But I can't blame them. I could have gone down to the planet to see him one last time if I wanted. The locals would not let a soul who died on their soil leave it, and they interred him there. I could have gone down. I didn't. I couldn't. In the end I couldn't say goodbye. No goodbyes. Not between us." 

The silence stretched then. Stretched into almost a quarter arn. I remained still, not eating. Waiting. There was more she had to say and I would hear it. Finally: 

"I loved him, Alzar. And I never told him. He was the bravest, the kindest, the wisest being I ever knew. I loved him so much that it hurt me. Selfish as I was, I couldn't stand the agony of it. Barely knew how to handle it. And now my chance is gone." She took a deep breath and looked up then, straight into my eyes, her pain slicing into me like a Cutter. "I won't return to space ever again. I mean to die on this rock, if it will take me. I deserve no better. And my cowardice has sealed my fate." 

I hissed in a rush of air then, and my own courage rose up in that moment. 

"Aeryn," I said softly, knowing what my next words would be simply because I had imagined speaking them to her so many times. The wisdom that would help her see herself free of that pain. "You can't hold on to the past like that. You have to let go. For your own sake." And mine, I thought. And mine. "Emotional pain is part of life, but you can't cling to it." They were words I had given to my Mother. But they suddenly seemed as hollow as rotted wood to me even as I spoke them. 

Oh Hezmana, her eyes. They burned into me. I saw truth in them that I could not ignore. 

She would not let go. She could not let go. I could feel the flaw in my thinking then, for knowing that she would never let go, never abandon that pain ... I knew that I had been wrong. I could feel it as surely as the breaking of my own heart. She would never love me. She was lost to me. Sometimes you *can't* just let go. 

Her pain was all she had left of him. And she would not give it up. 

The empty place on her bench mocked me with her absence. Only the faintest scent of her hair remained, along with the half-finished bowl of stew with the blood-streaked spoon still stuck in it. 

She did not come and sit with me the next day at mealtime. Nor the following. I had broken some trust with her by asking her to let go. I had always scoffed at those in my life who had clung to the past. Like my Mother. I was beginning to think now that letting go was not really what I had been talking about all this time. Acceptance...perhaps. The dulling of the hurt over time? Perhaps. But while the pain of the cut might fade, the reason for it never should. Was I only now just realizing that? 

For Aeryn, asking her to forget her dead lover or to forgive herself would be tantamount to cutting out her own heart. I could see without even asking, without her telling me, that this man she spoke of had been perhaps the only light in her life. To give that up, even if all she had of him was pain, would be to rip out the best part of herself. 

And because I knew that *I* could never let her go, that made me a hypocrite. 

I stopped eating in the Mess Hall again, returning to my pre-Aeryn schedule of working through the midday meal, burying myself in my work. My Mother's Name-day had come and passed, but I had surprised everyone by gifting her with a day off of my time. We together, she and I, finally talked about Yaro. We had settled out on the enclosed porch of the Clanhome and simply talked. It was, she said tearfully as the day ended, the best gifting she had ever received. 

Those words did not make my ache go away. 

I still thought of my Aeryn every day, still brought up her manifest first thing. Each night I still dreamed of her in my arms, and each morning I expected and dreaded to find her name on the list of dead. 

And then, almost a cycle and a half since she had first walked through my doorway, a stranger entered the command booth. 

The man reminded me of the first time Aeryn had come in under that archway only in that he was totally out of place in a Cutter Quarry. He had the same look to him that Aeryn had, that of a warrior. Sleek and competent. This one, I noticed immediately, did not carry an orange jump under his arm. He was not here for a job. 

"I was told that you're the big boss-man around here. Alzar Das?" 

"That's me," I said, coming around the panel, wiping my suddenly shaking hands down on my own worn jump. "What can I do for you?" Why was my skin turning cold with dread? 

He looked me up and down almost impatiently, as if he had no time for courtesy. He was haggard and thin, his jaw unshaven, his clothing worn with use. Under the stress lines I could see that he was handsome in a way that I never was. That few males were. 

"I'm looking for someone," he said shortly. 

How did I know, in that moment, whose image he would show me? Perhaps it was the striking similarity in mannerisms...the clear and obvious differences between both of them and the rest of us. Not colonists. Not cutters. Never that. 

"They told me at Recruiting that you had an 'Aeryn' here." The dead hope in his voice was like cold metal against warm skin. 

The image he showed me was stunningly different from the woman I knew. She was smiling wryly in the picture, long dark hair spilling down her back, her face half turned as if caught in the middle of a biting comment tossed idly over her shoulder. 

She had brutally cut that hair before coming here, I knew now. A striking difference between those long strands and the hacked length that now brushed only the fine line of her jaw. What had that act meant to her? It was a regret that seemed distant and unimportant in the face of what this handsome stranger represented to me. 

At first I forced myself to feel happiness for her. That was, perhaps, as close to altruism as I would get. Mostly there was just a howling emptiness as I looked on the man and knew him to be the one that Aeryn spoke of. Not dead at all, but very much alive, and looking as if his soul had been torn from him. Just like hers had. 

This is the part where I opened my mouth to tell him that she was here. That his search was over. That the lost hollowness in his eyes was soon to be filled again. He would be happy. She would be happy. I could have let her go, let her go with the thin hope that one day she might forget this man and perhaps turn to me. 

But, I didn't. And this is not that part. 

*** 

That had been a full solar day ago and I stood now in the chill, stark hall of the infirmary, looking through scratched plex at the dark spill of Aeryn's hair against the white of the cot. Unable, yet, to look at her face, I could only stare at the sharp edges of her shorn hair. 

The same day that I had sent her lover away, that I had watched his face fall as he grimly accepted the information I didn't have for him, she had finally fallen from the Wall. An accident. The sort of thing that occurred too frequently in the Quarry to be called freak happenstance. 

She had been working on the Wall, trussed in her rigging, suspended thousands of clicks above the bottom of the Quarry with her fellows. All cutting into the exposed surface of rock, searching for that one Kaidin vein that would be big enough to justify a new Crevice. There could be as many as 200 Cutters on the Wall at once, a palette of green-laser stars on black matte. Each one carefully dancing clear of the other's rigging. Each one carefully keeping the deadly beam focused only inwards. To the rock. 

Someone had accidentally cut her rigging. It happened. It was something that didn't occur as frequently as one might think, given the numbers of workers on the Wall...given the darkness of the Quarry and the utter delicacy and deadliness of the Cutters themselves. She had fallen and had only been saved from certain death by becoming tangled in the intricate webbing of another worker who had happened to be Cutting below her. 

The tangle had saved her from falling into the pit, but had also neatly snapped her neck. 

I'd never believed in things like fate or destiny or any of that dren, but standing there, my breath fogging the panel between us, I wondered if she had somehow felt the last of her hope die when I had sent away her seeker. She couldn't have known, of course. And she believed him dead anyway. But there it was. A coincidence? Or punishment for my selfish act? 

Perhaps both. 

How do you choose, in that moment which comes to all of us, between what is right and what is right for you? I knew that if I had told the sad stranger the truth, she would not be lying in that cold room, held in stasis while nanites attempted to repair the shattered bones of her spine. And, Hezmana help me, I still couldn't say that I would have been able to give her away even if I could have him back in my booth one more time - showing me that picture. Even if she died because of it. 

And the probability of her death was indeed high. In fact, the Med who had tended her had not even bothered to fill out a chart for her. He had only shaken his greying head in resignation as he had left Isolation to work on others with a greater chance. 

The pale lines of her face were gentle now, still solemn, but somehow at peace. She was getting what she had wanted from our anonymous Quarry on our anonymous Colony world. That final quiet. The dark fringe of her lashes rested on the cream of her cheeks, only the faintest of color in her lips. I was free now to look my fill of her. 

And there was definitely a part of me that greedily took in this small thing that was offered me. It was I who watched over her deathbed. It was only me. Not him. Just my Aeryn and me. 

Mine now, yes. But only like this. 

I finally tore myself from that silent vigil and stalked out of the Med Center into the dusty heat of the afternoon to stand near the wide entrance way. I was shaking. The clutter and noise of the still-young spaceport battered at me like a sandstorm, but I was used to background noise. I could hear only the recrimination of my own thoughts. 

The twin suns above could not bake warmth into my bones, even though I still wore the stifling, padded black jump that was my work uniform. The bustle of the marketplace rattled at my senses, yammered for my attention, but I couldn't think of anything except the woman dying inside that cold place. 

Alone. Even though I watched over her, she was alone and I knew it. And finally, the memory of my brother came to me. For once, I did not push it away. He had died alone in that alley. I had never wanted to think of it that way. Never wanted to think past the fact that he was gone and that there was nothing I could do about it. 

But, Hezmana, I could grieve. I should grieve. Why had I refused that pain? It was not something to let go. It was all I had left of him. 

My feet were moving without urging now. Away from the Med Center. Away from Aeryn's tomb. I was walking quickly through the port, going I knew not where. It was only once I found myself in front of the Port Authority that I stopped. 

He would be gone by now. I didn't know who he was. I couldn't even ask the CargoMaster for a shipyard manifest. And I still didn't really want to give her back. So why was I moving again? Why was I scanning the crowds for that face I had only seen once? That 'kind and brave and wise' face? The one she would never let go? 

The suns were sinking, the blue slightly higher on the horizon than the yellow. Long shadows streaked across the dusty streets and pale, ochre walls soaked up the last of the day's warmth. 

Now this is the part where I tell of how I saw him sitting in an outdoor cafe with a large Luxan warrior. This is the part where I didn't hesitate as I walked over to them. Or is it? Indeed, I couldn't move from the shadow of the tinker's booth I found myself next to. I could only stare at him across the street, the man who would wake Aeryn like a child's fantasy hero. But what if he didn't? What if she was already dead? 

What if? 

I can't say that this deserves to end so well. Not for me. And for me, indeed, this is not a happy ending at all. But I did walk over to him, and it only took the minimum of words to convey the purpose behind my presence at his table. A bigger man would have rejoiced to see the light come to the stranger's eyes. To see hope rekindled and joy bloom. 

I could not go with him when he leapt over the slender rail that separated the cafe from the street, leaving the Luxan with the bill. I watched him for a moment as he ran down the sun-streaked stretch of dusty lane towards the Med Center and then I turned to go. A hand on my arm stopped me, it was the Luxan. 

"Thank you." He said, staring at me as if he could see into my soul. I made no response. Only pulled out from under his grip and walked. What were his thanks to me? Not strangely, I found myself in the alley where my brother had died and there I sat on a crumbling crate. It is where I sit now. Remembering Yaro. 

Weeping. For him. For her. For me. 

And at last, this is the part where I was supposed to witness one of two things. You can make your choice, for it past my story now. He might go into that cold, white room and wake her with a kiss. Or perhaps just sit faithfully at her bedside till she opens those blue eyes to see him there, no dream, but real. 

Or maybe she'd already gone. Witness the tearful tragedy of the handsome seeker arriving at her deathbed. Watch him fall, weeping, over her still form. 

I didn't want to know. I only knew that I had no true part of her, and never had. No part except now. The pain that I carried because of her would always be mine. 

And I would never let it go. 

**END**

Comments appreciated at [analise@2cowherd.net][1]. 

   [1]: mailto:analise@2cowherd.net



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